What Do You Want To Learn? 20% Time in Education

Google employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time on innovative projects of their choice. Learn to extend this model to your students, and experience your own 20% project.

At Google, employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time on projects of their choosing. This practice has fueled the fantastic pace of innovation at the company in recent years. Many Google features and tools, including Google Scholar, Google News, and even Gmail, started out as 20% projects. This is a great model for teachers to follow with their students. Four days a week, require students to work on the standards and their assigned work. One day a week (or an hour a day) offer them the opportunity create, do, or try something they are interested in learning about - with you and all the resources of the school at their disposal. (This is not unlike the popular Senior Project model, but there's no need to wait until a student's senior year of high school!)

This session focuses on how the 20% model can be implemented in classrooms, and every participant will have to time to try (or kick off) a project of their own! This is project-based and passion-based learning.